Ten Solid State Drives from OCZ Technology

Our today’s roundup is going to talk about solid state drives from OCZ. The ten products covered in this article include the simplest models, such as Onyx, alongside with the high-performance Vertex 2 SSD on SandForce controller.

In our recent roundup of solid state drives we noted the rapid development of that market and promised to test more such products. So today we are going to benchmark as many as ten SSDs from OCZ. This brand is well known to every computer enthusiast and its SSDs quickly earned a good reputation thanks to their efficient Indilinx Barefoot controller. We talked about them about a year ago, but there have been changes since then. OCZ has released new firmware and new product models while we have transitioned to a new testbed and methods. So, it is high time we took another look at the considerably changed line-up of OCZ’s solid state drives.

Testing Participants

OCZ Agility, 60 GB

OCZ Agility, 120 GB

The mainstream Agility series is expected to offer the most appealing price/performance ratio. Every Agility model is based on a full-featured Indilinx Barefoot IDX110M00 controller which works with MLC flash memory and 64 megabytes of cache. OCZ declares identical speeds for both the 60GB and 120GB models: up to 230 MBps at reading and up to 135 MBps at writing (and a sustained write speed of 80 MBps). There is also a 250GB Agility with the same speed specs and a 30GB Agility with a read speed of 185 MBps and a write speed of 100 MBps. These SSDs were among the first to support the TRIM command.

Like the rest of the Indilinx-based SSDs in this review, these products have firmware version 1.5.